Perhaps it makes sense that Alex Parkinson’s feature debut would simply be a flip of the dimensions of his usual fare. The documentarian has long made a career out of the kind of nature documentary that is more about the people said nature affects than the nature itself. As in his 2024 Living With Leopards, Parkinson employs a curious conglomerate of archival and surveillance footage, first-hand accounts, interviews and, most pertinently, re-enactments, in apparent attempt to dramatize how the natural world can inspire community, chosen family and unusually strong bonds.
So went his 2019 documentary Last Breath, co-directed with Richard Da Costa, which chronicled the strange survival story of Chris Lemons, a saturation diver who somehow lived through nearly 40 minutes of oxygen deprivation in the North Sea, off the coast of Aberdeenshire in Scotland. The 2025 Last Breath is its Hollywood mirror: a slightly fictionalized account of the same incident made with a documentary feel. Yet the narrative is lacking in nearly every facet in which its predecessor succeeded; though the narrative version has access to its real-life counterparts for inspiration, its result is hollow re-creation, both underwritten and overly muscled.
Last Breath’s focus on the unpredictability of unexplored territory seems inspired by the machinic, otherworldly, crisis-style cinema of Apollo 13 and Sphere. But it seems equally inspired by the world of such tick-tock labor films like September 5 or All the President’s Men; films in which mostly men pull the levers and push the buttons to see through an uncommon scenario. But, as astonishing as Lemons’ survival may be, Last Breath crucially lacks the urgency of its disparate influences, which seems partly due to its lackluster stakes — the crew isn’t here to stave off an apocalypse or discover uncharted waters; they are here to replace a gas pipe.
Still, the real-life story is mesmerizing in its own way. In 2012, Lemons (played in the narrative film by Finn Cole) was caught in the deep sea without oxygen flow after a computer error set off a domino chain of bad luck, leaving his umbilical cord literally severed as he desperately tried to swim back to safety. Though he theoretically should’ve only had five minutes of breathable oxygen, the young, doe-eyed and bushy-tailed diver survived an additional 29 minutes of oxygen-less purgatory. How he not only lived but emerged without any lasting physical or mental injury is a cold case.
Last Breath eventually harnesses the standard pleasures of a procedural drama when it leans into the button-pushing of its niche profession at work. After an especially trite opening act chock-full of overtly foreshadowed, cliched and chummy dialogue — including an odd streak of requisite homoerotic, homophobic banter out of Duncan Allcock (Woody Harrelson) — the film does settle briefly into a flow of honorable, quotidian heroism. Though Dave Yuasa (Simu Liu) begins as a cold automaton (in the documentary, Yuasa admits to feeling “nothing” about Lemons’ near-death experience), he and Allcock click into a sober duet of saviorism once their third’s life is in danger, and their focused work is appreciably portrayed with verisimilitude.
Nonetheless, the film’s tension is almost immediately diffused by a slavish devotion to the facts. The documentary delays information about Lemons until its final act; its narrative equivalent is confusingly told in egalitarian real-time, almost as if anticipating an audience whose patience cannot be tested. It doesn’t help that the dialogue is rote and persistently worthy of an eye-roll, replete as it is with devotion to teammates and camaraderie in the face of unprecedented adversity, or that nearly every second of the film’s runtime is leaden with saccharine scoring — an exhausting swell of orchestral music that never lets us forget for even a second just how majestic this moment is supposed to feel.
Ultimately, Last Breath fails to justify its own existence apart from the documentary from which it spawned. Though Harrelson brings depth to Allcock, a devoted diver on his last rotation underwater, Yuasa, Lemons and Lemons’ fiancée Morag (Bobby Rainsbury), not to mention the bulk of the rescue crew, are painted in such cipher-like broad strokes as to be merely props in a staid game of re-enactment. That may be an approach that has worked for Parkinson’s past documentary projects, but in narrative it is tiring. For a film about the claustrophobic survivalism endemic to deep-sea diving, Last Breath is oddly relaxed, a movie whose tension seems just as lost underwater as its subject.
Title: Last Breath
Distributor: Focus Features
Release date: February 28, 2025
Director: Alex Parkinson
Screenwriters: Mitchell LaFortune and Alex Parkinson & David Brooks
Cast: Woody Harrelson, Simu Liu, Finn Cole, Cliff Curtis
Rating: PG-13
Running time: 1 hr 31 mins
